Letters to the Editor | Week of March 25-30, 2024

Put brakes on despots

In early December 2022, Donald Trump suggested one way to fix the “rigged” election and restore him to the presidency would be to terminate the Constitution (his words). No indication how. But he is trying to claim immunity for crimes committed even before he was president, and has long asserted that Article 2 of the Constitution conveys almost unlimited, unchecked presidential power.

That is the danger of him achieving even just that first, “one day” as the dictator he so aspires to be (also his words): he wouldn’t necessarily need much more than that. Sixty nay votes in the Senate might not exist and a complicit Congress heavily laden with like-minded Republicans could permit him anything. Or even do it for him, as they just did in scuttling their own immigration bill on the Trumpian whim.

Many in the electorate, especially on the right, don’t seem to realize “strong men” care for nothing but their own rule. It often requires a war (global or civil) to depose them. Think World War II, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini; or Pol Pot in Cambodia; or any given “president for life” in Africa. “Constituents” serve only to put an autocrat in power. Maintaining control is the sole goal thereafter, whatever the cost in blood or treasure, or any freedom enjoyed before.

We thought the Cabinet and Congress would rein in Trump. We’ve all seen how that worked. We dare not risk it again. Cabinet members spoke up only after leaving their posts and making money from derogatory tell-all books. Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, Marco Rubio and others who excoriated Trump during the 2016 campaign have fawned over him ever since. Republicans, drunk on the Trump Kool-Aid, are terrified of being “primaried.”

Anarchy on the right supersedes any desire to govern; power has replaced national — and international — interests.

An informed electorate must put the brakes on the wannabe despots by voting them all out of office — or “free and fair” elections may very well be a thing of the past in these dis-United States.

Vicki L. Bunderson

Brownsville

Navalny eulogized

Nobility and passion still exist in a world lost in the minutiae of accountability.

It is the era of Putinism, Trumpism and denial and rejection of human dignity and human worth. And Alexei Navalny, a butterfly in flight, floating in the tempestuous winds of time. And like a butterfly, exquisite and mesmerizing.

His body, mind and spirit captured and conquered, but the majesty and splendor of his brief his existence is forever etched in the reflection of his audacity to spread his wings and capture the imagination of the world.

In this handout photo taken from video provided by the Moscow City Court on Feb. 2, 2021, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny shows a heart symbol while standing in a defendants’ cage during a hearing in the Moscow City Court in Moscow, Russia. (Moscow City Court via AP)

Rainbows and butterflies. Manifestations of the renewal of hope and the renaissance of human conscience and compassion, found in times of manifest tribulations commanded and demanded by the arrogance of tormented minds, that know not the passion nor the power of truth and of dreams.

Free at last — from the generational reign of terror and intolerance, and from the chains of oppression and suppression. Free at last, to fly beyond the rainbow, and beyond the fabricated and manipulated apocalyptic landscape of unlived vestiges of human dreams — like a butterfly in flight — forever exquisite, forever mesmerizing.

A. Garcia-Wiltse

San Juan

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